I want to be able to boot up my laptop from USB flash drives. However, no matter what boot loader I try the laptop does not recognise flash drives as boot devices and just ignores them.

My most recent attempt was the Bootflash script from Wary 70. The Combo format option causes the computer to freeze when I try and run it but the other options run but don't make the flash drives any more detectable.

I have previously tried the Puppy universal installer, Unetbootin and more manual formatting and installing of different bootloaders.

I have read about Plop but I can't seem to understand the point of it. While it raves on a lot about USB booting it looks to me like that is a false description and shouldn't refer to booting at all.

If it is not possible for my laptop to boot from flash drives then okay but I need to understand why it treats USB Hard Disk Drives differently and if there is anything that that indicates about flash drives.

USB bootability varies widely among different machines and BIOS's. I have a fairly recent machine that will only boot from a USB CD-ROM drive.

Since you have tried several techniques to make a bootable flash drive and they all failed, the most likely culprit is your particular machine. You need to find some other machines to include in your testing.

Quote:

but I need to understand why it treats USB Hard Disk Drives differently

Sounds like you need to "Flip The Removable Media Bit " to make the flash drive act as a hard drive.
Here is one from Lexor that might work for you
http://freestickdownload.blogspot.com/2008/05/bootit-lexar-usb-flip-romovable-media.html

Flipping the bit does not always work. There are three kinds of USB stick.
1) those that pretend to be hard disks
2) those that pretend to be 'superfloppies' like an iomega zip drive (this is the most common)
3) those that can be flipped between 1) and 2) by changing 1 bit in the controller.
The layout of the boot/partitioning is different between the two

Most BIOS will recognise 2) AND NOT 1)
Some recognise 1) and not 2) which I suspect you have (Thinkpads T4n I know fall into this class)
even less recognise both.

It is possible to confuse the issue and format the drive incorrectly so a type 1) can be formatted as if it was a type 2) and vice versa. This will confuse even BIOSes that normally would recognise either type.

One BIOS that I know looks at the bit and reports the type is the AMI BIOS from an ECS k7S5A Pro which is perhaps why they are so popular.

Tools like FLASHBOOT ask you which type your stick is.
Windows treats the drives differently and reports type 1) as a 'local' disk and allows you to cache writes and partition it whereas type 2) show as a removable drive and it won't cache writes properly or allow partitioning other than as a single partition.
There are drivers for Windows that if used treat type 2) as if they were type 1)
As a IT Consultant I carry one of each type with Puppy+ wine and Hiren plus a load of Portable Aps on._________________"Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush" - T Pratchett

Yesterday I had Slacko 6.3.2 running nicely on a brand-new 16gb flash drive, then because of problems running pBurn, replaced Slacko with a persistent Ubuntu 16.04 install. Ubuntu was too slow, though, and the multimedia stuff didn’t work the way it does when running on my internal hard drive. So I formatted my flash drive again (to ext2) and tried to go back to Slacko 6.3.2.

The problem now: Each time I install Slacko on my flash drive, the Puppy installer says:

“It seems that partition sdb1 does not have it’s [sic] ‘boot’ flag set, which is required to make it bootable.”

As soon as I open Gparted, though, the boot flag appears to already be activated. I have tried: toggling it back and forth, formatting my flash drive as a fat32 partition and then formatting it back to ext2 (with both Gparted and Fdisk, on two different computers) but when I attempt to boot from my flash drive now, the message is always “missing operating system.” I tried booting my computer from a flash drive that had a different Linux OS on it, and it worked perfectly. I can open files on my Slacko flash drive, so it doesn’t seem to be dead, it just won’t boot anymore.

Oops! Looks like I stumbled upon a solution by myself. I installed a grumpier distro, and it could only be erased by creating a new partition table. Once I had done that, I was again able to flag my drive as “boot,” without also flagging it as “esp” while running Gparted in Ubuntu. This dual flagging had been the root of the problem before, I think, and now I am back to having a functional, bootable Slacko USB install.

Anyway, I followed your link, rcrsn51, and it suggests an interesting work-around that I will keep in mind for later, especially if I get more interested in dual-booting. For now, I would prefer to take my chances debugging pBurn rather than mess with Ubuntu anymore. It is just getting too bloated, and the Amazon thingy built into the desktop kinda gives me the willies! Thanks for your help.

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